


Scribbling on the Sky

by lilacmermaid



Series: Funeral Blues [1]
Category: Madam Secretary
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacmermaid/pseuds/lilacmermaid
Summary: Fall, 1988 - A late-night conversation has unexpected consequences for Elizabeth & Henry.
Relationships: Elizabeth McCord/Henry McCord
Series: Funeral Blues [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1550989
Comments: 37
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

“Henry?” Elizabeth whispered, her heart clamouring in her throat.

She held herself still and stiff in the darkness, her head resting in that spot on his shoulder that had always seemed perfectly sculpted to fit her cheek.

“Hmmm?”

“What would you think about us moving in together?”

“Wha — really?!”

He’d sounded muzzy with sleep a moment ago, and she’d known that her hushed voice might not be enough to draw him back to wakefulness from the depths. In truth, a part of her had hoped that her cautious words would simply sink like pebbles in a pond, leaving no lasting trace on the water’s glassy surface.

Now, though, she heard his heart skip a beat beneath her ear, and her own heart shuttered and retreated in response, trying to burrow deeper inside her chest. “Yeah – I mean – it’s silly for both of us to keep paying rent on two apartments when we could just pool our money and probably find something nicer.”

Henry was silent for a moment. Was it possible he had fallen back asleep?

“Henry?” she said again, a little louder this time. There was no taking back her words now that they had been released, and the longer the silence stretched between them, the more the suspense threatened to strangle her. She nudged him gently. “What do you think?”

“I’d love that,” he said quietly.

Elizabeth flashed a dazzling grin that nobody could see and hugged him closer, pressing a kiss to his bare chest.

ooo

The next morning, Elizabeth woke with the smile still on her lips, and it only grew wider as she snuggled closer to her sleeping boyfriend – and soon-to-be roommate!

Elizabeth lived alone, and she loved it that way. She’d done the whole dorm thing already, all throughout boarding school, and then again as a freshman, sharing a floor with upwards of forty other girls. She’d liked most of them well enough, but as the months passed, she found herself craving quiet and solitude and the space to just _breathe_ , and so the second exams were over, Elizabeth had signed a lease on her very own one-bedroom apartment.

It was small and plain and more than half an hour from campus if she walked quickly, but it was hers – the one indulgence she allowed herself. She used to wonder, sometimes, if her parents would have disapproved of such a luxury, but now, more than a year later, she was a junior and thriving, feeling more confident than ever in her decision. Disciplined with every other penny of her inheritance, Elizabeth hoped that they would have understood that she couldn’t bear another minute of the noise and the mess and the drama that came with being Becky’s roommate.

But living with _Henry_?

The idea had begun as a mere inkling some time ago, a whisper from the very depths of her heart. She’d tried to bury it at once, always her first instinct when it came to her desires or feelings of any kind, too afraid of watching them shatter if they ever saw the light of day, and shattering _her_ right along with them.

It was a bad habit, one she was trying to overcome, but this particular daydream already felt so much more dangerous than any that had come before it, and indeed, the quiet longing did not oblige her and fade away. Instead, it took root and sprouted up, growing so large in recent months that her heart could hardly contain it, and in all the time since then, she had never known whether she’d been bracing herself for the moment the wish would escape her lips, or mustering the courage to free it herself. She didn’t know what she’d have done if he’d said no **.**

But he hadn’t. He’d said yes, and lying there with her arm around his waist, Elizabeth couldn’t have tempered her joy if she’d tried – it felt like any dream in the world she cared to pursue was hers for the taking now. Risking it all last night had been _so_ worth it, earning her the most incredible reward she could imagine. So, what other wonders might life have in store for her if only she could stop being afraid long enough to want, to chase, to claim them?

_Do I dare?_ Their second anniversary was just around the corner, after all, and she loved him _so_ much. With Henry graduating in December and then heading off to basic training in the spring, maybe it was time to start making some more long-term plans.

(But all of that could wait for another day. For now, Elizabeth could just be proud of herself for this enormous first step, and let herself enjoy it).

She savoured the warmth of Henry’s sleeping body beside her for longer than was wise on a school day, but finally dragged herself from the bed and crept quietly out of the room, putting on a pot of coffee in the kitchen. When it was ready, she settled down on the floor in front of the couch with a bowl of cereal and a stack of textbooks, a light blanket draped over her shoulders. It wasn’t often that she woke before Henry, but he obviously needed the extra sleep, and Elizabeth could use the time to get a bit more studying in before her last midterm this afternoon. Maybe over dinner they could even start the apartment search!

It was at least an hour later before Henry emerged from the bedroom. “Hey, Sleepyhead,” Elizabeth said, looking up and smiling affectionately – it still amazed her how a room could suddenly feel so much warmer and sunnier with him in it than it had a moment earlier without him. “There’s still some coffee if you want it. I was about to come check on you – you’re cutting it close this morning!” She reached for her own mug to finish the last swig.

“I think we should take a break,” Henry said.

Elizabeth choked and spluttered, and it was several moments before she could speak again. “That’s not funny,” she said, glaring at him and pressing a hand to her chest to calm her stumbling heart, which was having trouble recovering its rhythm after missing more than a few beats.

“I’m serious, Elizabeth. I need some space, I need to clear my head.”

Only then did Elizabeth notice what she hadn’t before – that Henry was standing there stiffly with his hands in his pockets, but his thick brown hair was all over the place, a sure sign that he’d been running an anxious hand through it for a while before coming out of the bedroom.

She gaped back at him, utterly dumbfounded. “What are you talking about?” she demanded, when she finally found her voice. “Henry!”

He wouldn’t look her in the eye. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” was all he said, and before Elizabeth could scramble to her feet, he was already out the front door, shutting it quietly behind him. She heard a car door slam, and an engine, and then silence.

_I must have fallen asleep studying_ , she thought dazedly, reeling after him. That was the only reasonable explanation for this nightmare.

But laying eyes on the little table in the entryway was what brought reality crashing down on her shoulders, because on it, Henry had left behind the spare key she’d given him.

He was really gone.

Elizabeth’s knees were slamming down on the tile before she recognized that her legs had given out underneath her, and her palm rose to hold back the soundless wail that was clawing its way out of her chest. With her other hand, she clutched her stomach, which was suffering all the agony of a sucker-punch, though nobody had laid a hand on her.

A single thought occurred to her, before her mind went utterly blank – how could it all have gone so wrong?


	2. Chapter 2

The days that followed were the very worst of Elizabeth’s life.

They shouldn’t, she knew, rank anywhere close to the spring she’d lost her parents. But devastating though their deaths had been, there was nothing _confusing_ about the accident – it was a matter of physics, clean and simple and always reliable. Two cars had tried to occupy the same space at the same time, colliding at just the right angle to cause the maximum damage.

The implosion of her relationship with Henry, meanwhile – that was a sticky matter of human emotions, and Elizabeth simply couldn’t find her footing amidst all the debris. In spite of every promise she’d ever made to herself after the accident, she had allowed herself to love again, desperately and with her whole being, allowed Henry to take up residence in every corner of her heart, scraping off the faded old wallpaper and tearing out the worn carpet to reveal the original hardwood below. That he should vacate his place there so completely and without warning was so much more inexplicable to her than a random car crash on a sunny June afternoon.

Elizabeth had remained kneeling on the floor like one turned to stone for a long while after Henry left, still clinging to her stomach, stupefied until the ringing of the telephone caused her to lift her head, reflex dragging her to her feet. Her throat raw and her joints stiff, she’d peered blearily over at the phone for a moment, before lowering her outstretched hand and letting it ring itself back into silence. There was only one person she could fathom speaking to just then, and if she knew Henry, he would come back and fix this in person, rather than doing it over the phone.

( _Did_ she know him, after all? She thought she had, better than anyone on the planet, but the Henry she knew would never have walked out this way. How could she have misjudged things so badly? They were plainly on very different pages when it came to this relationship, and she might have felt foolish if she could feel anything at all but the ache in her gut.

Shell-shocked and adrift, Elizabeth had somehow found her way to campus, carried on the wind in a bubble nothing but that throbbing pain could penetrate. Shrouded in a heavy fog, she glanced down in a daze at the pencil in her hand and the blank page before her. After only half an hour, she ducked out of her midterm for no better reason than that she simply didn’t want to be there anymore. She couldn’t have said, afterward, if she’d managed to answer a single question on the test.

Returning home to an empty apartment, the numbness had suddenly burst. The pain ratcheted up abruptly as she stepped across the threshold, and Elizabeth made a beeline for the bathroom, losing what little remained of her breakfast.

If she’d thought that the pain would lessen after that, she was wrong – shaken and shivering, she clung to the vanity to pull herself up and rinse her mouth, her stomach churning worse than ever. She and her wan reflection stared dumbly at each other for a long while after that, the gears in her head spinning out of control now that they’d been cranked up again and there was nothing more for them to do. The events of the last few days flashed before her eyes, but no matter how many times she tried to make sense of them, Elizabeth kept coming up empty.

The previous week had been perfectly ordinary – picnic lunches in the quad, study dates in the library, a couple nights at her place, and long hours on the phone before bed when they were apart. (Always her place when they were at home, since Henry shared a little house right near campus with several other guys, and privacy there was impossible to come by).

He’d come over yesterday and they’d made dinner together, as they did almost every week – Henry liked to attend the Sunday afternoon student mass at his church, and then they had the rest of the day to themselves. Neither of them had classes pushing them out the door early on Monday mornings this semester, so Sundays were their longest stretch of uninterrupted time together, and it was by far their favourite day of the week.

He’d seemed fine when they went to bed last night too, so what had changed? _What am I supposed to do?_ she asked her reflection.

_Fight for him_ , the little voice inside her heart whispered. _This is just a misunderstanding._ _If you go and talk to him, you can figure this out_. But Elizabeth recoiled viscerally from the mirror even as the thought was still forming.

Once when she was a child, Elizabeth had helped to bake a cake for her father’s birthday, but she’d forgotten to use the oven mitts to take it out and set it on the counter. The pan had been blistering hot in Elizabeth’s little hands and she’d cried out in pain, but she hadn’t let herself drop the cake, determined not to ruin this special day.

This morning when she opened her eyes, Elizabeth had been on top of the world, her heart filled to overflowing, but now her very _being_ felt as burnt as her angry and reddened palms had all those years ago, and all the cool water in the world wouldn’t be enough to soothe the pain this time.

Elizabeth was incapable of letting a single argument go unresolved when she was fighting on somebody else’s behalf, but going after what she wanted for _herself_ had required no small effort on her part last night, and it had clearly backfired in a truly spectacular fashion – she wouldn’t be taking chances like that again anytime soon. If he ever wanted to see her again, Henry was going to need to make the first move.

Suddenly bone-tired, Elizabeth stumbled into the bedroom and curled up on her side of the bed, but her brain was too wired and her heart thumping too hard for the rest of her to unwind. There was nothing she could see or smell or feel in this room that didn’t remind her of Henry, and everything hurt.

_But it doesn’t_ have _to hurt_ , she thought to herself. Hadn’t she spent four whole years trying to outrun the pain of losing her parents after they died? She knew how to do that only too well, throwing herself headfirst into every opportunity that presented itself, anything to occupy her waking hours, exhausting herself so that sleep might come more swiftly when her head finally hit the pillow.

Though she found them draining, even parties had been a welcome distraction, all the energy and the noise doing its best to drown out any lingering thoughts of her parents. And all the while she had worn a mask, flashing the world the biggest of smiles, so wide that sometimes she could fool even herself. But behind that smile, Elizabeth had been nothing more than an empty shell.

Above all, though, it was math she had always relied on – it could transport her to a whole different world, one where every equation was safe and predictable and she didn’t have to feel anything. Always her favourite subject in school, a love of algebra and calculus and especially geometry had been something she had in common with her father, the way she and her mother had a shared love of horses. With him gone, the familiar formulae became for her a kind of meditation, and even now she could hear the numbers calling to her, their hypnotic chant promising oblivion.

_Don’t do it,_ she pleaded with herself. Four years worth of repressed emotions had done its share of damage, and the painstaking process of undoing it all was so much worse than if she had just dealt with her feelings as they had come.

Elizabeth had only allowed herself to even start _thinking_ about her parents again a little over a year ago. _Forced_ herself, really, with all of Henry’s support but none of his coercion – without his knowledge at all, in fact. It was beyond time to work through this, she knew, though she stubbornly drew the line at seeking professional help. Letting Henry get a glimpse inside her head had been hard enough – she couldn’t imagine ever letting her guard down like that with a complete stranger.

And so she began a new nighttime ritual: lying in bed after turning out the lights, she would select a single memory from her childhood, and play it through in its entirety behind her eyelids, making herself relive all of the emotions that the memory brought with it. Her earliest attempts had been much like dipping one toe into an ice-cold lake, leaving her skittering backward at the first sign of discomfort.

But then an old memory surfaced of a family trip to an _actual_ mountain lake – how she’d tried easing herself gingerly into the freezing water, but still found herself squirming and covered with goosebumps on the pebbly beach while everybody else splashed and laughed and roughhoused in the water. She’d watched her father take a long dive off the dock, gliding far out from shore before coming up for air.

“C’mon in, Lizzie!” he’d shouted. “It’s not so bad if you jump straight in!”

Trusting her father without question and not allowing herself the chance to change her mind, Elizabeth had taken a running start and executed a perfect cannonball off the dock. The icy water was a terrible shock to the system at first, but by the time she’d reached her father’s side, her chattering teeth were smiling.

She resolved to treat her mind in much the same way after that, immersing herself entirely in the memories and allowing herself to feel the pain. When the initial sting had faded, a heavy sadness still lingered at the loss, but it wasn’t quite so overwhelming as before, and she found that she could feel past it, recalling the anger and fear and above all _happiness_ that had coloured her childhood.

_You can still fix this_ , the little voice persisted, tugging on the threads of her attention, trying to pull it away from the textbooks still scattered all over the coffee table. Her parents, once dead, were gone forever, but this was a break-up (or a break?), and there was still hope left.

But even picturing Henry’s face right now was much, much too painful, to say nothing of actually speaking to him. And so, in spite of her father’s lesson all those years ago, Elizabeth fled back to the living room and turned to the one thing in the world that had never yet let her down. Seizing the first textbook that her fingers touched, she pored voraciously over the formulae until her eyes would stay open no longer, all the while throwing back up the walls that she’d spent more than a year dismantling.

This was a gigantic step backward, and she had to swallow again and again, dismay tasting like failure in her mouth.


	3. Chapter 3

Classes resumed as usual on Tuesday, and so as the sun was rising, Elizabeth found herself standing once more in front of the mirror and summoning that old familiar mask, painting it over her features the way her friend Becky painted on makeup.

She’d worn it ever since she was fifteen, calling up the artificial smile before even emerging from beneath the covers each morning, as likely to leave her true face exposed as she was to go outside barefoot during a snowstorm, but casting off the mask last year was another resolution she’d made towards a better life for herself. She never imagined then that she’d be gluing it back on again, or that Henry could _ever_ be the reason, when his presence in her life had helped her to see that things didn’t need to be that way.

From the very beginning, Henry had always been most drawn to the parts of Elizabeth that had nothing to do with the mask – her intellect, and her drive, and the way she cared so much about people and animals and her country. They’d been together for nearly a year before Henry was allowed more than a glimpse of what lay beneath the mask, but he loved what she hid even more than what she projected, and these days, every smile that graced her face was real.

The smiles that Elizabeth plastered on in class that week could not have been any _less_ genuine, but nobody there seemed to be able to tell the difference. She prepared herself with small talk about being tired or hung-over with anyone who might notice her puffy eyes or the dark circles beneath them, but none of her classmates or professors gave her a second look. Still, keeping up this façade was far more effort than she remembered, and she was woefully out of practice – both days, she felt her face begin to quiver and twitch the way her muscles did after a long work-out, and she barely made it home before the mask was washing away like sidewalk chalk in the rain, her devastation resurfacing more pronounced than ever.

She was just glad that the people she passed in the halls in those days were acquaintances rather than friends, unlikely to ask probing questions – how could she ever have explained something that she didn’t understand herself?

Real friends, like Becky, would have had no such compunction – the moment she heard the news, she would be marching over with ice cream and cheap beer, expecting Elizabeth to rip Henry to shreds before bawling her eyes out. She’d watched Becky get drunk and sob herself to sleep over too many guys to count, but Elizabeth didn’t shed a single tear over Henry that entire week, and she could never have explained that in a way that Becky would understand. (Only Henry knew that Elizabeth hadn’t even cried when her parents died, not until years later, when he had found a way to unlock something deep inside of her).

But a reluctance to face a barrage of questions she couldn’t answer was only part of the reason that dread coursed through Elizabeth every second that she spent at school outside of the classroom during those days. She and Henry had always spent more time together on campus than they did off of it, with a dozen different places around the college where they could usually be found joined at the hip. Bumping into Henry at their favourite coffee shop, or their preferred treadmills at the back of the gym? Merely contemplating the prospect pulled the knots in Elizabeth’s stomach so tight that she couldn’t draw breath.

And so, she spent her days holed up in her living room, emerging from hibernation only when she was required to be in class and not a minute longer. The cushions of her couch began molding themselves around the shape of her body, and dust settled on all the other surfaces of the apartment, which remained untouched.

And all the while, Elizabeth threw herself into her schoolwork with abandon, though even geometry could not loosen the tangle in her gut, fused now into one enormous knot that only continued to snowball, an invasion heavy and jagged with ice. She ate little and slept less, only crashing into bed when her eyes burned so badly that she couldn’t read the words swimming before them. But in sleep, her body kept betraying her – mornings always found her waking on Henry’s side of the bed, which still smelled like the fresh soap he used, and something else that was just indescribably him.

She grew used to pressing her hand to her belly against the pain, her body always remembering the loss of Henry even when the rest of her was distracted, or before she was properly awake.

On Wednesday night, sleep abandoned Elizabeth entirely, the freezing ache gobbling up every bit of her body’s warmth. Not for the first time, she longed to drive over to the clinic on campus and beg for a shot or some magic pill that would make it all go away – but in her heart, she knew that no doctor would be able to treat what was wrong with her. No matter how resolutely she tried to clear her mind of anything but derivatives and tangents and the quadratic equation, her body knew that first thing the next morning she had political science, the one elective she was taking outside of her major, and the one class that she and Henry shared.

Rather than seeking the medical attention she craved, Elizabeth donned her heaviest flannel pyjamas, ones she normally reserved for the bitterest of winter nights, and cranked up the thermostat as high as it would go, huddling beneath every blanket she owned. Still shivering, she dug out her mother’s old rice-filled heating pad, the one she used to warm up in the microwave any time Elizabeth or Will had a tummy ache, and hugged it against her middle, curling the rest of herself around it.

None of it helped, and when morning came, Elizabeth wanted to weep just thinking of the energy required to change into real clothes. In the end, she could manage nothing more than sweat pants and a worn UVA hoodie several sizes too big, which was no improvement in terms of her appearance, and hardly seemed worth the aggravation.

Lightheaded with exhaustion and pain and lack of food, she waited until just before the second hand reached the twelve, and then entered through the rear door of the classroom, sliding into a seat in the very last row. She and Henry usually sat together near the front, but today she slouched low in her chair, surrounded by students more interested in catching up on their sleep or scoring invites to the next frat party than in attempting to best her for top of the class.

With a grimace that her faltering mask could barely conceal, Elizabeth slid one hand into the pocket of her hoodie and began to knead her stomach. The icy knot was burning worse than ever, tightening at the proximity of the young man she could _feel_ on the other side of the room, at once too near and much too far away.

Was he craning his neck around looking for her, she wondered dizzily? She’d never missed a class in her life, after all. Or had he thrown his backpack onto the empty seat next to him, so she couldn’t have sat there even if she wanted to? Contorting her body and tilting her head so that her hair cascaded like a greasy waterfall down to the page, she hunched uncomfortably over her notebook so she couldn’t find out, couldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of that chestnut brown head.

Professor Frawley's lecture droned on for an eternity, and Elizabeth’s hand sped across the page, taking down his every word in the most hopeless of attempts to crowd any thoughts of Henry from her brain. She soon lost all feeling in her fingers, but whether that was due to cold or to the vice grip she had on her pen, it was impossible to say.

By the end of the hour, Elizabeth was practically vibrating with the effort of not writhing in agony in her seat. When at last the professor turned over the last page of his notes, she let out a shaky sigh, shoving all her things haphazardly into her backpack before standing and hoisting it onto one shoulder. Her relief was short-lived, however – just as she was turning to go, Frawley announced the return of the essays they’d handed in earlier that month, leaving them on the large desk at the front of the room.

She hadn’t thought that it was possible for her to get any colder, but at this pronouncement Elizabeth’s knees promptly turned to ice water beneath her, and it was only sheer force of will that kept her upright and propelled her down the aisle, when everything in her was screaming to hightail it in the opposite direction. She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, pleading with her mask to hold even as she felt it flicker dangerously, like a candle at the end of its wick.

Spotting her paper easily, Elizabeth thrust her hand into the pile to snatch it up and get out of there – and her trembling hand brushed against one reaching for the paper right beneath hers. It was a hand she recognized all too well, almost better than her own, larger and warmer, the veins prominent from all his time in the gym.

She leapt backward, as though struck by an electric current.

They stared.

For a long time, that’s all they did, her gaze latching onto his as though he were a magnet and she nothing but a pile of scrap metal on the ground, filthy and broken and powerless to resist. Thunderstruck into paralysis, horror rising in her throat like bile, that was how Henry and Elizabeth laid eyes on each other for the first time in three whole days.

His eyes widened, in a way that she couldn’t even begin to process. On any other day, she felt sure, that look on his face would have felt beyond insulting, but right now she just didn’t have the energy to spare – and anyway, his shock was something deeper, more nuanced than just consternation at her disheveled appearance. She watched, detached, as his gaze swept the contours of her own face, knowing exactly how she appeared to him in that moment – haunted, unkempt in a way he had never seen her before, and _radiating_ pain.

Her mask fell.

She felt it sputter and go out, sliding right off her face, and with it any hope she might have had of summoning it back again anytime soon. She settled for pinching her lips together as firmly as she could, the ache so fierce that a tear leaked out of the corner of one eye, and she couldn’t even _attempt_ to conceal the way she clutched her stomach over her hoodie.

They might have kept on staring at each other until the end of time, transfixed while the rest of the world continued to go about its business around them – except that Henry took a breath right then, his mouth parting in just such a way that Elizabeth knew that his lips and his tongue were about to form the shape of her name, and she _could not_ stay to hear it.

She turned on her heel and ran.

The stunned look on Henry’s face playing on repeat in her mind, Elizabeth pushed her way out of the lecture hall, dodging her slow-moving classmates and throwing herself into the first stairwell she found, plunging so quickly down the stairs that she would wonder, later, how she had managed the escape without injury. Fueled entirely by adrenaline, she emerged out into the daylight and made a beeline for home.

_You idiot_ , her brain howled, so loud that it sounded like the whistle of a steam train right inside her head – of _course_ their essays were together in that pile. They’d submitted them together, after all. Researched and brainstormed and written them together, side by side in the library, exchanging their first efforts to critique before settling down to compose their final drafts. Of _course_ this had been bound to happen.

The more she thought about the whole nightmarish encounter with Henry, both of them standing there frozen and wide-eyed and speechless, the more the ache in Elizabeth’s stomach sharpened, laced with irritation. What on earth did _he_ have to be astonished about? What _right_ did he have? He wasn’t the one who’d had his entire life turned upside down without so much as an explanation.

Her feet pounding the sidewalk in tandem with her racing heart, Elizabeth didn’t slow for a moment, not even once she’d left campus well behind her and she knew for certain that Henry had not attempted to chase after her. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what she would have said to him if he had, but somehow the fact that he had just stood there dumbly, all the evidence of her despair laid out on a platter before him – that made her want to punch him in his stupid, beautiful face.

Elizabeth could find the strength of will to run forever if it meant keeping agony at bay, but the trek was a long one, and after three days of neglecting sustenance or sleep, with several blocks still to go, her body finally let her down. She slowed but did not stop, woozy from the furious pace she’d set for herself. Her lungs screaming for oxygen, she staggered and swayed, cursing herself for not bringing her car today.

Sometimes Elizabeth drove to class, when the weather was bad or when she was running late, but most of the time she truly liked the long walk to and from her apartment. She had never enjoyed exercise that _felt_ like exercise, but this half hour or more in the fresh air was usually just what she needed to unwind. This walk on a beautiful, sunny day like today, with just the faintest hint of her beloved fall in the air? It should have been glorious. It was perfect riding weather, the sort of day when she and her mother would have saddled up their horses after breakfast, only returning to the stables around nightfall, energized and refreshed and wonderfully, blissfully tired.

The fact that Elizabeth couldn’t enjoy a minute of this October, that Henry had managed to spoil even autumn for her, that she could look up at the clear blue sky without even an ounce of pleasure – that nettled her too. Rapidly running out of steam, her feet trod the pavement on autopilot, and it was only vexation that carried her the rest of the way home, annoyed for _being_ annoyed, a feedback loop of anger in a week when she’d been trying _so_ _hard_ to wall off any emotions at all.

Elizabeth slammed her front door behind her – or tried to, but the resulting sound was so pathetic and unsatisfying that her already-smoldering temper flared higher. If she’d had any energy to spare, she would have torn the useless thing right off its hinges.

And then.

And _then_.

She shrugged her backpack off her shoulder and kicked off her running shoes, tossing everything into the corner – and only _then_ did Elizabeth notice that her hands were impossibly, infuriatingly empty. After that, after going through _all that_ , she had left her essay behind. In her rush to leave, she had abandoned it exactly where she’d found it in the first place, on that desk at the front of the lecture hall, right on top of Henry’s.

Her head falling back as though her neck could support it no longer, Elizabeth screamed at the ceiling, unleashing every bit of fury that had built up inside her on the long walk home. And in the wake of all that rage, all the bewilderment and misery and pain of the last few days flooded every cell of her body until, thoroughly spent, she slumped back against her door.

In spite of all her valiant efforts this week – she _felt_.

She felt it all.


	4. Chapter 4

If the three days before Elizabeth saw Henry again had been agony for her, then the two that came afterward were pure torture.

When she began the process of confronting her demons last year, she went into it deliberately and methodically, loosening her muscles before opening her mind’s eye to the past the way she would before getting up on horseback, waiting until she was ready to absorb what was to come before ever setting off. The experience had still been a long and difficult one, but she had learned how to navigate that rocky path – learned to take slow, deep breaths along the way, learned to pause when she needed a moment to regroup. She learned to allow herself a reprieve entirely, on those nights when it was just too hard.

But feeling her bottled-up outrage and heartache surge through her bloodstream like water through a firehose, having them lick at her heels no matter how fast and how far she had run to escape them, having them catch up and overtake her before she was remotely prepared to face them – never before had Elizabeth been caught so completely off guard.

She leaned against her front door, sapped and shuddering for breath, her whole body growing heavier with every second that passed, until she seemed to be made of solid lead. Lurching from the doorway to the couch and collapsing there on her side, Elizabeth pulled a pile of blankets over herself, her muscles straining as though she had asked them to wring water from a stone.

She hadn’t moved since.

Some of the rooms inside her heart had been rendered just about habitable in recent months, but so many others had required a total gut-job, and were still stripped all the way down to the studs when Henry walked out. Injecting theorems and numerals like heroin into her veins for the last three days had allowed Elizabeth to remain oblivious to the rubble, sleepwalking from one room to the next without ever looking where she put her feet, but now that the high had worn off and she could no longer fool herself into functioning, she was forced to take it all in – every rusted nail, every crumbling brick, every rotting beam. With the electricity and the plumbing still switched off, the whole place was dark and cold and utterly, utterly empty.

Elizabeth had no classes on Fridays, but it truly wouldn’t have mattered if she did, because she couldn’t find it within herself even to roll over now, never mind attempting to go about her normal routine. Lacking the strength even to brace herself against the pain that had now spread like a cancer throughout her abdomen, she could do nothing but lay there as the anguish consumed her, blinking and breathing only when those basic reflexes took over, freeing her from the Atlantean task of filling her lungs, or closing her eyelids and expecting them to open again.

Twice the sun set and twice it rose again, but her eyes had grown so dry and heavy that the watery light barely registered through the picture window. Garbage trucks and dog walkers and kids bouncing basketballs came and went on the street outside her door, and Elizabeth didn’t so much as tilt her head towards the sounds. When a shrill and persistent robin alighted on the grass and began tweeting its cheerful song, even _imagining_ herself chasing the irritating thing off her lawn felt too exhausting for words.

Then, late Saturday morning, something _did_ make Elizabeth’s ears perk up – the squealing of brakes and tires coming to a stop in her driveway, and the slamming of a rusty car door. Seconds later, her doorbell was ringing, followed swiftly by a frantic pounding on her front door.

“Elizabeth?!” came Henry’s voice, announcing his presence as if she hadn’t already recognized the creaks and groans of the beat-up piece of junk he drove, or the tread of his shoes on her doorstep. Her brow had begun to furrow the instant he pulled onto her street, the most any of her atrophied muscles had moved in two days, and before he had even turned off the engine, she was already fully alert and struggling to her feet. She padded softly over to the door, one quilt still bundled around her and trailing on the tile.

She extended her hand towards the doorknob, yanked it back, and cautiously reached out again. Henry had uttered only one word so far, but his voice on that one word just didn’t sound right, all wild and keyed up and not at all like himself. Her name hung uneasily in the air between them, and in her belly, something began to stir.

“Elizabeth, please, are you in there? I need to talk to you, it’s important!”

The last time she’d seen Henry, dread and disbelief had been swelling inside of her, twisting and darkening and only when it had been about to erupt out of her very pores had she recognized her fury for what it was. What would it be like to face him again now, when she was drained in a way she had never been before?

She opened the door.

Right away, she wished that she hadn’t, because Henry’s eyes were as dark as coals and unrecognizable, his hair standing up in every direction. “Elizabeth – hi!” Henry gulped, his chest heaving as he sucked in some air. Even from where she stood, Elizabeth could see his irregular heartbeat beneath the damp grey of his t-shirt.

The cold and twisted knots in her stomach squirmed, now a nest of snakes in her belly, and she shivered, pulling her blanket more tightly around her shoulders. For a moment, just a moment, that blanket felt like nothing so much as a shield against the way he loomed large in her doorway, restless with agitation, and she wasn’t sure whether she was more upset with herself for ever allowing that thought to cross her mind, or with Henry for making her feel this way in the first place.

“I need you to come with me!” he blurted before she could speak.

Whatever Elizabeth had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “Where?” she asked warily, her voice croaky from disuse. And then a moment later, “ _Why_?”

“Elizabeth, _please_?” Henry begged. “There isn’t time to explain, we need to go _now_!”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” Elizabeth said, pitching her voice as if Henry were a spooked horse she needed to soothe – she’d never seen him so rattled, but even after nearly a week of heartbreak and radio silence, even thoroughly unnerved by his behaviour this morning, this was _Henry_ and she couldn’t bring herself to refuse him.

_Maybe I can convince him to let me drive_ , Elizabeth thought, casting a wary eye on Henry’s trembling hands as she slipped on her shoes and untangled herself from her quilt, tossing it back toward the living room. As soon as she shut her door behind them, however, his hands were everywhere reaching for hers, finally engulfing both of her wrists over the hoodie she wore, and practically dragging her off her front step.

“Henry!” she yelped, tripping over her own feet as he pulled her urgently after him – though not towards his car, but straight past it and onto the sidewalk.

When she’d been entirely too young for it, Elizabeth had seen a horror movie about an octopus, and for years afterwards, she’d had a recurring nightmare about one of the monsters coming for her out of the deeps, its enormous tentacles seizing her by the ankles as she tried to swim away. It had been a long time since she’d even thought about that dream, but now the memory came flooding back, brought on by Henry’s wandering hands and the eels slithering and roiling in her gut.

Steeling herself for an outburst, Elizabeth slipped from his grasp, quickly sliding one arm back through his before he could even think to protest.

They didn’t speak as they made their way down the tree-lined street, Elizabeth having to jog to keep up, the silence between them disturbed only by an airplane droning overhead. She tilted her head sideways up at Henry, trying to gauge his thoughts – she’d hoped that opening the door to him might be her chance to finally get some answers to the questions that had been tormenting her all week, but one glance at the way his eyes kept darting this way and that told her all too clearly that this was not the day for rational conversation.

Though it was not yet noon, the sun beat down mercilessly upon their heads, and every inch of Elizabeth’s body was soon dripping with sweat, her moist shirt clinging to her unwashed skin. Her hoodie trapped every bit of that heat within its heavy folds, the weight of it growing with every step.

For days, she had been unable to get warm, no matter how many layers she put on, but at some point while she’d been holed up in her apartment, a heat wave had evidently settled over Charlottesville, unseasonable for this time of year, and only compounding the uncomfortable dissonance of the entire week. The street was normally a riot of colours by now, but today the green leaves of the poplars and beeches were taking on sickly yellow hue, all the life and vitality leaching out of them before her very eyes.

Henry finally slowed when they reached the park a few blocks from her apartment. Elizabeth’s brow furrowed, but she continued to follow where he led her, clear of the trees, and right to the middle of the empty soccer field.

One eye on some spot above her head, Henry turned her to face him directly. She stood only half a foot shorter than him – less when she was wearing heels – but in this moment she felt small and defenceless, and her entire being wanted to shrink backwards at the way Henry towered over her. She would have, were it not for the heavy grip he had on both of her upper arms.

“Henry, what’s going on?” she asked shakily, finally finding her voice as her heart thundered in her ears.

“Okay,” Henry said, huffing and swiping his mouth with the back of one hand. He glanced up at the sky behind her once more, before looking her straight in the eye, and Elizabeth had to fight not to flinch at the way his feverish eyes were blown wide, with none of their usual sparkle. This was not her Henry – she didn’t recognize this man at all.

“Okay,” he said again, his features working furiously and threatening to spiral out of control. “So, the thing is, I made a mistake. I never should have walked out on you like that. I love you.”

Elizabeth gaped at him. “What?” she asked faintly. A few days ago, his words would have been welcome, and a few days before that utterly commonplace. Now, she couldn’t begin to know what to think.

But the words were scarcely out of her mouth before he was whirling her frenziedly around, and gesturing high above their heads. “ _Look_ , Elizabeth,” he pleaded, his heavy breath scorching her ear.

Elizabeth inhaled sharply, her heart coming to a screeching halt. MAR ME ELIB was scrawled in white across the pale blue sky, and as she watched, the skywriter completed his maneuvers, finishing with an E and a T.

And then, just in case she hadn’t managed to decipher the garbled message, there was Henry, in front of her now, and sinking down to one knee on the grass. He glanced up at the sky behind her for a moment, before zeroing back in on her, groping around into her sleeves to find her hands, and clamping down on both of them with his much larger ones. “Please, Elizabeth – marry me?”

Except for that brief moment when their hands had brushed against each other in class – could it truly have been just two days ago? – it was the first time since Monday that their skin had touched. Five days which felt like a lifetime, when the two of them were accustomed to near-daily hugs and kisses and a thousand other intimacies.

But though Elizabeth could have sworn that she was already roasting from the inside out, touching Henry now felt like laying her hands on a radiator, his skin drenched with sweat and sliding without resistance against hers, so that he had to squeeze even harder to keep a hold of her hand. Everywhere they touched, she could feel his pulse racing out of control, and she had to take only the shallowest of breaths, his scent like ozone before the most ferocious of storms, and nothing like whatever pheremones he normally exuded whenever she couldn’t get enough of him.

Everything, _everything_ about this moment felt wrong, and Elizabeth’s flesh _crawled_.

All week, she had thought that nothing could be more painful than the blow Henry had dealt her, that nothing could feel worse than her stomach throbbing with knots and the way all the heat had been sucked from the world. But this? This was _infinitely_ worse, the world transformed into one enormous furnace, and snakes writhing in her belly until she felt sure she would be sick all over the grass.

Her face burning, and a river of sweat pouring down between her breasts, Elizabeth wrenched her hands from Henry’s grasp and scrambled backwards, unsteady on her feet. _Who are you?_ she wanted to scream, staring down at him in disbelief, but the words simply wouldn’t come. It was as if she had never seen him before in her life.

“Elizabeth,” Henry said, his voice hoarse and despairing now. Breaking the circuit formed by their hands seemed to have doused some of the fire from his eyes, but she held up a hand, both to stop him from speaking another word and from coming even one inch closer. He remained on his knees, and made no move to follow after her, but she needed as much distance as possible between herself and the imposter wearing her love’s face.

“I need—” she began, but broke off. _Time_ , is what she wanted to say. Time to process everything that had happened today, and this week, and over the last two years.

“I need to go,” was what she actually whispered, taking off running, through the grass and back to the safety of home.


	5. Chapter 5

Elizabeth could not get out of her sopping clothes fast enough.

It had occurred to her, halfway home from the park, that this UVA hoodie she’d been living in for two days straight was far too large on her for one very important reason – it wasn’t hers. It belonged to _Henry_ , only finding a home in Elizabeth’s wardrobe because she had liberated it from his closet more than a year ago, craving his scent and his arms securely around her even when they were apart.

It didn’t feel anything like comfort today, however, the fleece constricting all around her body as soon as she saw the hoodie for what it was, as though the snakes had freed themselves from her stomach and were conspiring to squeeze all the oxygen from her lungs. 

As soon as the door was firmly locked behind her, that hoodie was the first thing to go. It resisted her efforts at first, and there was one terrifying, claustrophobic moment when she couldn’t find her way out, the waterlogged material clinging to her face and smothering her, but she managed it at last, hurling the sodden garment to the floor. Everything else swiftly followed suit after that, until she stood stark naked and panting in the middle of the living room.

Quaking with revulsion, she cast the entire pile of clothes into the washing machine, cranking the dial up to its highest setting and slamming the lid shut. Scouring her own body from head to toe was next on the agenda, but before she could catapult herself into the shower, she heard once more the rattle of Henry’s car in the driveway, and it halted her in her tracks.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Henry as he had looked in the moment before she’d turned and run from him, distress carved deep in every line of his face. Her stomach churned, thinking of him behind the wheel of his car in such a state, but the queasy dread she’d felt when he so much as looked at her was stronger – she _couldn’t_ open that door again. Instead, she stood there, stock-still but for her galloping heart, hardly breathing until the sound of the engine faded away into the distance.

Barely a trickle of scalding hot water flowed from the showerhead, but Elizabeth couldn’t wait even one more second for the laundry to finish, kneeling and scrubbing herself all over until she could no longer feel the press of unfamiliar hands against her, no longer smell the ravening, wolfish scent.

Much later, when her skin was raw and both the water and her boiling blood had cooled, Elizabeth emerged from the shower. She noticed at once just how stuffy and stale the air in the apartment had turned, just how much her home had begun to mirror her state of mind in its darkness and disarray.

Slipping into a fresh tank top, she threw the bedroom window open wide, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. She felt battered and stiff from all the punches this week had thrown her way, but the serpents in her belly had quietened at last, shrinking back into dormant knots, and her head was clearer than it had been in days.

Henry’s sudden appearance on her doorstep had jolted her back to the land of the living, and now that it had, Elizabeth was determined to remain there. There was still so much to process (and in her free time, she would think of little else), but in the meantime, it did no good not to look after herself.

And if, as she suspected, this was what life was going to look like from now on – well, she might as well start getting accustomed to it.

After taking a moment to fill her lungs, she turned and surveyed the rest of her home, galvanized but calm, and resolved to do better.

She began the task of setting her world to rights by flinging open all the rest of the windows in the apartment to let in a cross-breeze and what was left of the daylight, and then turned her attention to her living room. She folded the many blankets that were strewn all over the floor, fluffed the sagging couch cushions back into shape, and closed the textbooks that still covered the coffee table, stacking them into a neat pile in one corner.

(The renovations inside her heart had always been backbreaking work, even before Henry left, but there was a kind of adventure about it too, something to be said for camping out with him in there by flashlight, dreaming about the day when the project would finally be completed. It had all seemed so bleak when he walked out, all that work wasted, but it wasn’t, she realized now. It had never just been about making a home for Henry inside her heart – _she_ had to live there whether he did or not. And so, even as Elizabeth was tidying up her life in the real world, she was also sweeping up the mess inside her heart, and preparing to hang the drywall in the next unfinished room.)

Lastly, Elizabeth made her way into the kitchen. The thought of even the saltiest fries or the creamiest sundae tasted like cardboard and sawdust in her mouth, and her stomach had long since ceased growling for her attention, but it had been nearly a week since she’d eaten a proper meal, past long enough if she was serious about taking care of herself. Sparse at the best of times, unless Henry was coming over to cook, her refrigerator was particularly empty today, once she’d thrown out the moldy blueberries and stale pizza, but she managed to scrounge together some cheese and crackers and an apple that was only barely bruised, downing it all around the swollen knots in her stomach. 

On Monday, Elizabeth marched herself to campus as usual, nodding grimly when the midterm she’d bombed was returned to her. Her average would take a nasty hit, but there was still time to pull it back up a bit before the end of term, and she’d already done more than enough to pass the course.

Attending class and catching up on her readings and assignments filled much of Elizabeth’s time that week, but in the background, the wheels in her head kept whirring along, and whenever she set her textbooks aside to walk to the grocery store, or lay in bed at night before falling asleep, Henry was never very far from her thoughts.

What could possibly explain his behaviour – any of it, from the moment he’d taken a sledgehammer to their lives by walking out, to thinking he could glue all the shattered fragments back together by proposing? No matter how long Elizabeth probed her memories of the last few weeks, scrutinizing his expression from every possible angle and parsing out every spoken word, the answer remained maddeningly out of reach.

There had been a split second, she was certain, with Henry kneeling at her feet and peering past her up at that train-wreck of a skywriting job, when she’d seen a flicker of something like shame skitter across his face. Later, though, when he was grasping her hands tightly in his own, trying to keep their connection from unraveling like the threads of the life they had been weaving together, she’d had the uncomfortable feeling that whatever he was seeing in that moment, it wasn’t _her_. Because surely Henry, of all people, should have known, should have been able to read on her face that _any_ of this was the last thing she wanted?

Was she grateful that the park had been empty but for them that morning, nobody else there to witness the whole baffling and humiliating ordeal? Or would it have been better – would she have felt _safer_ – if there had been somebody around to intervene if things had gone even further south? She still didn’t know where she stood on that question, and that, more than anything else, set the knots in her stomach to pulsating again when she thought about it for too long. He had let go, let her back up _the second_ she tried, but…

She _had_ needed time, though she hadn’t been at all sure that Henry would grant it – it was days before she could stop flinching at the sound of a car turning onto her street, days before his smoldering eyes stopped lurking in the darkness whenever she closed her own. Even when the resonance began to fade, the aftershocks coming fewer and farther between, Wednesday brought her yet another sleepless night, knowing that she’d see him again in PoliSci the next morning.

Elizabeth was more prepared this time, however, driving to school and parking in the nearest lot, primed for a quick getaway. Her shoulders squared, she took a seat near the front of Professor Frawley’s classroom, opposite where she and Henry normally sat and flanked on all sides by other students. Her heart thrashing about inside her ribcage, she kept a steady eagle eye on the door, ready to assess his state of mind from the moment he entered the room, and poised to flee, her feet planted firmly on the floor.

But he never came.

For the entire lecture, his seat remained empty, and instead of feeling her lungs expand with relief, instead of feeling the tension melt away from her shoulders at the reprieve, Elizabeth was surprised to find her panging heart sinking like quicksand inside her chest.

That’s when she knew that it was time to talk.


	6. Chapter 6

She settled for Saturday morning.

Sooner would have been better, now that Elizabeth had made up her mind – delaying only allowed her imagination more time to rocket into overdrive, sparking and short-circuiting as she wondered what Henry had been thinking and feeling and doing in the days since she’d run away instead of telling him she’d be his wife, more time to agonize over what she was supposed to say to him when they stood face to face.

What did she even _want_ to say? In her mind she saw a crossroads, with stony pathways meandering off in a hundred different directions, and shrouded in mist so thick that she couldn’t see where any of the trails might lead – and herself, paralyzed, at the centre of it all.

But sooner wasn’t possible. On Thursdays and Fridays, Henry dashed from lectures to ROTC drills to his part-time job and back again, and she knew that it would be unfair to ambush him in the midst of his responsibilities just because now she’d decided that _she_ was ready to talk.

Like it or not, she was going to have to wait.

Her mind continued to spin, strands of her thoughts unspooling themselves from her head like spider silk. They inched stealthily down her body, binding around her lungs and coiling tighter and tighter with every hour that passed.

When Saturday dawned, Elizabeth woke to find herself utterly ensnared in their web, the knots in her belly fluttering convulsively and threatening to rise once more as the snakes they’d been the last time she saw Henry.

She cast about for a loophole to loosen the tension, and before she could even open her eyes, a litany of excuses descended upon her like a deluge.

What if she just … didn’t get out of bed today? What harm would there be, really, if they just carried on as they had been doing? The semester would be over in just a couple more months, after all. Couldn’t they just keep avoiding each other until Henry graduated?

_No._

In the end, it was Henry’s hoodie that made up Elizabeth’s mind for her. It was newly-washed and folded, and she caught sight of it on her dresser the moment she summoned the will to roll over in bed. _No_ , she thought again, forcing a breath so deep that it frayed some of the tangled strands around her lungs. _You’re not going to chicken out now, because we can’t keep going like this_.

And if it _was_ truly over between them, then that hoodie was just the first in a very long list of things that needed to be returned to their rightful owners.

The knots in her stomach squirmed madly, then constricted, as she made the familiar drive towards Henry’s house, even her insides unable to settle on how they felt. But every maple and oak she passed was standing tall and blazing red today, so vivid she could practically _taste_ the colour on the breeze with the window rolled down, and that made her brave.

The temperature had plunged back down to normal overnight, and it was the loveliest day of the season so far, cool and crisp, _just_ warm enough that she could get by without a jacket, the sun beaming brilliantly in the cloudless sky. This kind of day had always been Elizabeth’s very favourite, the kind that held the promise of her mother’s warm apple fritters, and thermoses brimming with cider.

Parking on the street, she hopped out of the car and strode swiftly up to Henry’s house, rapping on his front door before the courage could fade. She well knew by now how to breathe through the pain whenever the knots in her stomach drew taut, but there was little she could do when they swelled and wriggled sickeningly again – she heard footsteps in the entryway, and her knees knocked together as she imagined his face when he discovered her here, his eyes darkening and burning.

Instead, it was one of his roommates who answered her knock, and she cringed when his eyes widened at the sight of her.

“Hi, Mark,” she said quietly, flashing him a small, rueful attempt at a smile, and trying hard not to wonder what he knew. “Is Henry here? I’d like to speak with him.”

“He’s not here, sorry,” Mark replied, still eyeing her curiously.

Her eyebrows shot up, her heart skidding in her chest. “ _Oh_ ,” Elizabeth choked, the air getting stuck somewhere halfway before it could reach her lungs. In all of the possible scenarios that her mind had conjured up in the past few days, this had somehow never been one of them. Had he even made it home last week? She’d _known_ he was in no condition to drive after everything that had happened between them in the park. What if he—

“He might be at church?” Mark offered, mercifully sidetracking the runaway train inside her head. “I think he’s been spending a lot of time there lately.”

Elizabeth thanked him and went back to her car, already feeling the spiderweb tightening once more around her lungs. How was she supposed to go home now, when the road before her rose, daunting and demanding, all the way to the distant horizon? How was she supposed to try all over again some other time, when coming here once had already been like slogging knee-deep through an endless sea of mud?

But instead of taking that long road straight back the way she had come, when she reached the intersection, Elizabeth found herself making a left turn. _I need to understand what happened_ , she thought, her hands tightening with resolve on the steering wheel. _Until I do, I’ll never be able to move forward_.

She pulled into the parking lot of Henry’s church just a couple minutes later, the knots in her stomach continuing to writhe, then clench, then writhe again. The lot was almost empty, and she sat there for a while this time before getting out of the car, her skin prickling with nervous energy, like a runner settling back into the blocks after a false start.

She inhaled deeply, and fidgeted with the wrists of her sweater, worn thin in places from her habit of stroking the stitches there with her thumbs. It was her favourite sweater … and the one that Mrs McCord had knit for her last Christmas, when Henry brought Elizabeth home to Pittsburgh for the holidays for the first time.

Whatever signal Elizabeth would be relaying to Henry with this sweater, it wasn’t deliberate – she had simply grabbed the most comfortable thing she could find that _wasn’t_ the just-washed hoodie. _That_ particular item of clothing sat in the backseat of her car, and glancing back at it now in the rearview mirror, she could still sense its slimy fleece slipping and shrinking against her skin. The remembered alarm of that touch had much diminished in the last week, however – more than anything, she mourned the warmth and absolute safety that the garment used to hold and never could again.

This sweater, on the other hand – it was warm and soft, and Mrs McCord had used cerulean wool matching her eyes so perfectly she’d always known that Henry had selected it. Putting on this sweater always made her smile wider, made her heart feel full, made her hold her head a little higher, and she badly needed that today, even if only her subconscious had known so this morning.

A wool sweater, an old hoodie … just how many more ordinary objects were forever linked with Henry in her mind? Would it always be like this, thinking of him and their time together every time she happened to stumble upon them? If this was the end, would she need to replace her dishes because his tongue had licked those spoons, her Scrabble set because his fingers had placed those tiles, her pillows because that’s where he had laid his head? Like this gorgeous sweater, the threads of their lives were already inextricably woven together, and to untangle them now seemed impossible, not without lasting damage on both sides. But weren’t they already damaged now, possibly beyond repair? What _was_ she going to say to Henry, even if she did succeed in finding him here?

Taking one more deep breath and wiping her clammy palms on her jeans as she got out of the car, her mind more muddled and bogged-down than ever, Elizabeth dragged herself over to the side door, and crossed the threshold of the church that she’d driven past a hundred times, but never entered before.

She caught sight of Henry at once, and froze to a halt in the vestibule, but he was lost in his own world, and never glanced in her direction. He was stepping out of a kind of a curtained booth at the back of the sanctuary when she entered, and as she looked on, he made his way over to a small chapel opposite where she stood. It held a simple altar before the statue of a woman clothed in blue, all of it flanked by row upon row of little votive candles.

Elizabeth blinked, her head swimming. _Was that … confession?_ she guessed, uncertain. _And … Mary, maybe?_

But it was too much to take in all at once, and she was floundering, hopelessly out of her depth – she could count on _one hand_ the number of times her parents had ever taken her to a church of any kind, never mind a Catholic one. How come nobody had every taught her about any of this stuff? Why had she never asked Henry?

Hardly daring even to breathe in the silence, she watched him drop a few coins in the donation box and light one of the candles, before taking a place at the altar.

He crossed himself, sank wearily to his knees, and bowed his head.

_I shouldn’t be here_ , Elizabeth thought suddenly, guilt gnawing on every organ it could find. _I shouldn’t be watching this._ There was something so deeply vulnerable, something so staggeringly intimate about the display that he made in this moment, and he had no idea that he wasn’t alone. How dare she spy on him now? She should have waited in the car – or better yet, gone with her first thought and driven straight back home.

But she simply _couldn’t_ take her eyes off of Henry.

Instead of turning right around and leaving the church, she found that her feet were carrying her deeper into the sanctuary, until she was hovering right outside the little chapel, her heart pounding in her throat.

He, too, was wearing his Christmas sweater, the mossy green one that did such pretty things to his eyes.

To Elizabeth, it felt like that might be some kind of sign.

She couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to – she could tell just by the way he carried himself that he was _hurting_. His broad shoulders trembled with tension and tears, and they shook harder the nearer she drew. By the time she came to a stop as close to him as she dared, his head hung low with devastation, cradled over the altar between his outstretched arms.

All of the knots in her stomach loosened and uncoiled in an instant, so abruptly that their loss after so much time brought its own kind of pain. She pressed hard against her belly with one hand, her eyes falling shut for a second, just until she could breathe again.

Elizabeth had always known that there was one last barrier remaining, a kind of gauzy curtain that draped between them and veiled over the truth when she couldn’t talk about her past or her family or her dreams. Even after Henry had found his way uninvited into her heart, even after demolition had begun, and they were as close as two people could be in such an impossibly small space, chipping away at old tiles and grout and extracting stubborn screws – even after all of that, she’d known she wasn’t giving him the full picture.

What she _hadn’t_ understood was that the curtain worked both ways, blurring sharp images into little more than hazy silhouettes, even when she could feel the warmth of his body through the gossamer material. In all the hours spent gazing upon Henry in the last two years, thinking she knew every inch of that beloved face, never before had _she_ been able to see _him_ completely and with perfect clarity.

Until now.

His hair was a richer brown with the lifting of the curtain, his outline more crisply defined. Details and angles and entire pieces she’d never known she was missing out on were visible now – they’d been there all this time, she just hadn’t been able to see them properly in the shadows. From his place at the little altar in that chapel, his very _soul_ seemed to shine out like a beacon.

_I know you_ , she marveled, her heart swelling in her chest.

_This_ was her Henry, not that wild imposter who had knelt before her in the park, the heat of his eyes and his skin searing everything they touched. _Her_ Henry gleamed like a whole different person in the light of the candles and the stained glass, shiny and new and yet somehow _achingly_ familiar.

This was her _home_.

For the first time since Henry had walked out of her apartment nearly two weeks ago, Elizabeth felt entirely safe and calm and sure, and it took everything in her power not to just march right over there, wrap him in her arms while he prayed, and never let him go.

She didn’t yet understand exactly how or why it had happened, but everything about this moment was _real_ and _raw_ and Elizabeth was so overwhelmed by it that her knees nearly gave way beneath her.

_He uses prayer the same way I use numbers_ , Elizabeth breathed, her heart breaking a little inside her chest. _He came here trying to find peace_. But where she was ever looking to _run_ from her feelings, or to bury them deep when she could not escape, Henry was choosing to immerse himself in them, laying them all out on the altar for God to see.

When she set out this morning, Elizabeth could never have chosen a path at the pebbled crossroads, even if all the fog had lifted, even with every single one of them clearly labelled on a map – she genuinely had not known then what she _wanted_ to happen after she and Henry spoke. For days now, she’d been assuming that they were probably definitely over. But did they _have_ to be? _Is there a chance we can still salvage things after the mess we’ve made?_ she wondered, stunned.

That little voice inside her heart, the one she’d turned a deaf ear to ever since all of this began, was singing out now, an unrelenting pealing of bells fairly clamouring to be heard, because it knew all along what she hadn’t even a few minutes ago –

She _absolutely_ wanted to try.


End file.
